Who Killed Santa Claus?

December 1, 2018February 17, 2024 ~ Sharon Abbott ~ 2 Comments

The intersection of story and memory and perception is a funny thing. It isn’t just the details of the narrative but how we perceived it at the time – in other words it’s not just what happened but how did our five year old self understand what was happening – that’s where the story lives.

*Santa visited our house every Christmas Eve with his elves and pack of presents. That’s me in the pony tail with my back to the camera*.

Our kids will tell you that we didn’t “do Santa Claus” for religious reasons. In fact, the truth is nothing so noble. Paul and I were both raised on the fat man in the red suit who brought toys to good boys and girls. As parents, we didn’t do Santa Claus because we couldn’t afford many presents and I wanted the credit for giving them the cool gift. There, I’ve said it out loud and now you know what a truly selfish and awful person I really am. I wasn’t going to let Santa swoop in at the last minute to give them that thing I had scrimped and saved and stood in the blocks-long line to get the day it went on sale. The jolly old man had made not one sacrifice to obtain this year’s must-have toy, and he certainly was not going to get to play the hero in my stead.

Our kids each got three gifts from us – I think because that’s the way it was in Paul’s family. We tried to get them one thing they really wanted, and then the other two were something small: a book, a craft, something to go with their toy (an outfit for the new doll, etc.) or maybe new pajamas or slippers (One year I sewed nightgowns and robes for all the girls. Don’t ask – I have no idea why I thought that was a good idea. This is the same year that Sean found the scraps of fabric on my bedroom floor and was convinced I was making them a Punch & Judy puppet show. Who knows where that came from ??!!) These gifts were purchased, wrapped and hidden away until Christmas morning.

The little gifts they made or bought for one another and for us were carefully selected and fussed over (was this really what she would like or maybe it was that or maybe something else all together??), then wrapped with care and lots of tape and placed under the tree to be poked and prodded and arranged and rearranged all through the weeks leading up to Christmas (and sometimes re-wrapped).

Until Christmas morning.

After they are asleep – or all in bed with a promise of physical harm should they exit their bedroom before morning – Paul and I bring out our oh-so-carefully-chosen and hopefully something-they-will-love offerings. Gifts are always arranged in piles according to the giver so that the emphasis will be on “what you are giving” instead of “what you are getting”. Everything you are giving to someone else is placed in a stack at your spot with your stocking – hand crocheted by Grandma Fletch – and then we wait for the morning.

No one is allowed to leave their bedroom until you hear the music – Manheim Steamroller’s Deck the Halls – blasting loudly enough to wake the dead. Of course, they are all awake, or maybe had never gone to sleep, but they dutifully wait for their cue. The music calls to them and here they come, scrambling down the stairs or up the stairs depending on where their bedroom is, running to find their stocking and their pile of gifts to give and eyeing the stack in front of Mom & Dad. Those will be the last ones distributed.

We start with the youngest who gets to choose in which order he or she wishes to bestow what everyone already knows will be a Life Saver Storybook. I no longer remember how this tradition began, but early on it was the mandated gift that the youngest among them gives to the older siblings. With much fan-fare, everyone oooohs and awwwwwws over it as though it is the biggest surprise of the season and one which they cannot possibly live without.

Gifts are opened one at a time since this allows for time to admire and exclaim over each one and we all compliment the giver on his or her good taste. One by one, we ceremoniously present our gifts to one another and everyone watches as each one is opened. This takes awhile and has the added benefit of alleviating the frenzied ripping of paper that inevitably leads to mass confusion and chaos and cuts down on the number of times we will need to dig through the trash looking for a lost doll shoe, Lego piece or other sundry tiny items. Plus it stretches out the festivities and makes more of a party, which in our family is always a good thing.

And that was Christmas morning.

I don’t know if our kids missed not “doing Santa”. The truth is I never asked them. I realized pretty early on though that we needed to have “the talk” if we didn’t want our friends and neighbors to hate us and our kids. “Some people like to pretend that Santa Clause is real,” we explained, “and that he is the one who brings their children presents and so you can help them by not saying anything that would make them out to be a liar.” I mean, we didn’t say it exactly like that, but we had to coach them up a little to keep the peace.

And then there was the year that one of our Sunday School teachers at church killed Santa Claus. He wanted to teach a lesson about the real Saint Nicholas and how the “Santa Claus” of today grew out of the myths and legends (danger Will Robinson!!) around this real man who lived in the third century. And while I’m sure he meant well (you can probably see already how fraught with peril this plan was), he somehow failed to see the landmine he was about to trip over. So somewhere in his lesson about this kind and generous patron saint of children, he comes to the place in the story where Saint Nichols dies. Now to a small child, who only vaguely understands anything you have said up to this point but who thinks you are telling him that Santa Clause and Saint Nicholas are one and the same, this is, of course, alarming. “Santa Claus died?” asks a small voice in the front row.

At this point, any thinking person would have abandoned his ill-conceived lesson and just gone straight to the craft tables, but he soldiers on. Another little voice, with a hint of a quiver, asks “How did he die?” And then the mother of all landmines: “He was martyred,” says the teacher. KABOOM!! While most sources say Saint Nicholas was persecuted for this faith, I can’t find anybody who says he was martyred, but given this was before the internet, maybe this teacher didn’t have access to good research or maybe he just thought it made for a better story.

At any rate, that’s what the teacher said. Now there is a full-blown panic rising from the masses as one child jumps to his feet and yells SANTA CLAUS WAS MURDERED??!! (martyred or murdered – what’s the difference, really?) And it was at this moment that all hell broke loose and became known in the history of our church as “The Day Cedarbrook Killed Santa Claus.” Our son, who was about 10 and one of the older kids in the class, was standing in the back of the room with a friend who says to him, “Do you still believe in Santa Claus?” Nope. “Me neither. But I sure feel sorry for these kids.”

We fielded a deluge of calls from irate parents that week, letting us know how traumatized their children were as a result of the Sunday School lesson and that when it came time to explain the “Santa situation”, they had expected to be the ones to do it and they certainly would have handled it much differently, thank you very much.

And though I didn’t say it, because I thought it might be too soon, I thought about telling them, “Yes, but just think, now you’ll get to take credit for all that stuff under the tree.”

murdoch — No one was taking credit for this one but me!

You Have a Great Past Just Ahead of You

July 9, 2017March 20, 2024 ~ Sharon Abbott ~ 5 Comments

If you were part of the “second family”, summer vacation to you meant the beach: sand and sea and the smell and taste of salt on your skin. It’s boogie boards and sunscreen and the sound of seagulls and the sting of jelly fish and buying the tee shirt with a beagle in the hammock and going for ice cream on the sound. But if you were one of “the four” and you grew up in the land-locked midwest and it was 1980 something, summer vacation was a whole other thing. It was camping in the rain, little cereal boxes of your favorite cereals (except for the Raisin Bran which nobody wanted), trips to the ER for stitches and ear infections, and Silver Dollar City.

The first family vacation we ever took that was not to visit grandparents came about from a conversation with Paul’s brother David who insisted that the perfect vacation spot was hidden away deep in the Ozarks in an out-of-the-way spot known as Branson, Missouri. Today, of course, Branson is a destination in and of itself which draws thousands upon thousands of visitors each year to its music shows. But this was before all that. This was about a little theme park where you rode the trolley from the parking lot to the gate not because it was too far too walk but because it was one of the few “rides” the park offered and you listened to the patter of the “tour guide” who explained that you were about to step back in time – 100 years to be exact. “Welcome to Silver Dollar City – where you’ll find a great past just ahead of you!” he promised as we stepped off the trolley and into some of the best memories we would make as a family.

The first time we went was sometime in the early 80s; there is some disagreement among us as to the exact year so we’ll just call it 1980something. We sent away for the brochures and when they arrived in the mail (Seriously. That’s how we did things before the internet.), we sat down on family nights and poured over them: planning our itinerary, studying the maps and highlighting the best route from Illinois to Missouri, making a budget, writing the lists of all the things to do and take and ready before our big adventure. How many weeks (months) did we do this?

Because we had no money, we knew hotel rooms and restaurant meals were out of the question. But not to worry – for a fraction of the cost we could buy a brand new tent (I think we already had some sleeping bags we had collected along the way) and thanks to our trusty brochures we found the Blue Mountain Campground nearby (with a swimming pool and laundry facilities!) where we could pitch our tent. We could afford tickets to Silver Dollar City for a day and half and the rest of the time we would vacation at the campground: swimming and collecting wood for the fire we would build to cook our meals and toast marshmallows for the s’mores. What could possibly go wrong you ask. Let me count the ways.

1. Before using a tent for the first time it would behoove. . . (okay – cross that off my bucket list – I have always wanted to use that word in a sentence). . . it would behoove you to set it up at home to make sure (a) all the necessary pieces are present and accounted for and (b) you actually know how said pieces fit together.

2. It rains in the Ozarks. A lot. Not all tents are waterproof. Soaking wet sleeping bags require a heavy duty dryer which can only be found at a laundromat. Also, a strong storm can blow down a tent altogether.

Early one morning, after a night where no one had slept due to the soaking wet tent, the soaking wet sleeping bags, and the all round soaking wet, miserable conditions, the owners of the campground took pity on us. Chad was outside our tent – yelling. “Faye says for y’all to come on up to the house for pancakes and get those babies in outa’ this rain!!” Thank God for Chad and Faye and Ozark hospitality!

3. Camp playgrounds are all fun and games until someone parachutes out of a swing, lands in the gravel, and slices open her hand which will require a trip to the emergency room for stitches, taking up an entire afternoon of vacation. In years to come we would battle strep throat, ear infections and stomach flu – so much so that it seemed it wasn’t vacation if somebody didn’t get hurt or sick.

4. It is best not to allow a three year old to jump into the deep end of the swimming pool holding a beach ball as a flotation device. This can go south pretty quickly.

5. It turns out young children are more enamored with playing in the fire and cooking over the fire than they are with eating the food cooked in said fire. They’re not so much about the char the fire leaves on the hotdogs or the crunch of aluminum-foil-wrapped- potatoes cooked in the coals which never seemed to get done. But they did absolutely love the little individual boxes of cereal that they could open up, pour in the milk and eat right out of the box.

The tent – before it blew down in the rainstorm

And yet, for all of that, we returned to the Blue Mountain Campground again and again, year after year.

And to Silver Dollar City. After the first year we figured out that for not too much more money, we could buy a season pass and then go to the park every day for our five days of vacation. We rode the train with its steam powered engine and never grew tired of the train robbers who entertained the passengers with their scripted and improvised lines.

We were regulars at the Silver Dollar Saloon where the singing bartenders served rootbeer in frosty mugs and peanuts in the shell. The saloon girls put on their show and hauled a sucker up from the audience to mock and ridicule him and so of course the kids figured out which chair they always chose to pull their victim from and convinced Dad to sit in the chair at least once a season. In the middle of the show Carrie Nation and her Suffragettes marched in to break up the riffraff and it took the Sheriff to restore order. The girls bought garters and when they got home they practiced the Can-Can and sang “Why do they call us wild women, wild women, wild women? Why do they call us wild women when we’re just as tame as can be“. Rosie was the main saloon girl and one day on our way to the park from the campground we stopped at a convenience store to pick something up and there was Rosie – buying a loaf of bread! Day made!

Scan 18 — Good times at the Silver Dollar City Saloon.

The street theatre actors recognized the kids from year to year and incorporated them into their acts. They were on a first name basis with the Sheriff and the Deputy, with the Hatfields and McCoys. With the Rainmaker and the Undertaker who wandered the streets with his measuring tape. They loved the Story Teller and knew what time she would be at her spot to tell stories and choose them to be a part of them. They knew the musicians and where they performed and what time to catch them during the day. They knew the lady who ran the general store and the basket maker and the blacksmith.

And then there was Mercy. He was the star of Silver Dollar City. He seemed to be everywhere: interacting with the guests, heckling and teasing and aggravating and everyone loved him. He knew our kids by name and if we missed a year he would ask them where they had been. Eventually they got to know the actor behind the character. His name was Jack McDowell and they invited him to lunch and he told them about Silver Dollar City behind the scenes. We exchanged Christmas cards and kept up with him and his career for many years.

12642961_1121398154561726_7387714377258334224_n — Mercy

There were a only a few rides: the American Plunge which was a log flume ride and left your stomach at the top of the summit before plunging you down the to the bottom and the Lost River of the Ozarks inner tube ride that guaranteed a good dousing under the waterfall. There was a ball pit and a playground and a carousel, but mostly it was about the community: the musicians around every corner and the street theatre which was both predictable and spontaneous, the craftsman and the artisans. It was about the funnel cakes and the frozen lemonade and the penny candy at the general store. As the kids got a little older we would let them roam the park on their own and meet back periodically to check in at a designated spot (it was a different time and a different place). One day I was walking through the park alone and I turned a corner to find the baritone from the barbershop quartet all alone in an isolated spot singing “How Great Thou Art”. His eyes were closed, his arms lifted to the sky and it struck me that he was not performing, he was worshiping. This was a private moment, not a public one. I tried to slip away unnoticed so as to not interrupt him when he opened his eyes and saw me. He blushed a little. “I’m on my break,” he said. “I just needed to recharge.” For years I would recall that scene when I needed to recharge.

Every day at the park started with the sheriff deputizing all the kids with sheriff badges and then lining them up to stand at attention as the flag was raised. The day ended with the lowering and the folding of the flag.

Scan 33 copy 2 — The Sheriff deputizes the kids every morning. . . with a badge.

In the evening we headed to Echo Hollow, the big amphitheater, for the Silver Dollar City Jubilee: an evening of Bluegrass music and comedy with Mercy as the warm up act. They might change the show from year to year but the performers were always the same – and once again they recognized us and greeted us like old friends. And then it was back to the campground where, if we were lucky, the tent and sleeping bags would be dry and we could light a fire and Dad would pull out his harmonica and we would unwind from the the day so we could get up in the morning, eat little boxes of cereal and head back to do it all over again.

I don’t know how many times we went on this vacation. Five maybe? Six? I know we went back a couple of times after Joy was born. She danced in the streets to the music, she plummeted down the American Plunge tucked in between us and rode the Lost River of the Ozarks, squealing with delight as the water fall dumped water over our heads. She rode the carousel and ate the funnel cakes and slept in the tent. But I think it was after that that we moved east and the story shifted.

We made one trip with all of eight of us. In was in 1989. Fletcher was a year old, Joy was five and the others were . . . older. But it wasn’t the same. Some of the old, familiar faces were gone, others had taken their place who didn’t know us from the next guy and there some new, added “attractions”. Still, it was enough the same that we could say, “Oh! And remember this?!” But you could tell that change was afoot.

The last trip – 1995. And that’s Jack McDowell in the middle.

In the summer of 1995 we were making a trip to Colorado for Paul’s parent’s 50th wedding anniversary. Somehow somebody suggested, “What if we went through Branson and spent a day at Silver Dollar City? But maybe we sleep in a cabin.” And so we did. We wanted Fletcher to see it, to experience it, but afterwards we all sort of wished we hadn’t done it. The magic was gone. It was more like a conventional theme park – more about the plethora of rides which had been added over the years and less about the craftsmen and the music and the street theatre. Less personal somehow and more crowded. We did look up Jack McDowell. who was working someplace else by then and had lunch with him. But he had moved on too, and we all mourned the loss of the place where we had met and spent so many happy hours. We stopped by the Blue Mountain Camp Ground just to see if it was still there. It was. Chad had died some time ago and Faye was away when we stopped, but when we went in the office, there on the bulletin board was a picture of two year old Joy.

Joy reminds me that in 1999, Paul and I and she and Fletch stopped again when we were traveling west to see family. Oddly enough, I have absolutely no memories of it. Maybe it was just too different and I didn’t want to remember it that way.

One of the kids said once, “Don’t you wish you could go back to Silver Dollar City for the first time?” And that sort of captures it. It was magical. Pure and utter magic. But it’s sort of like Camelot or Brigadoon. It’s been almost 40 years since that first time and now it’s gone and there’s no way to get back to what it was no matter how much you might wish otherwise. And maybe that’s where the magic lies. The place – as we knew it – is gone. The children – as we knew them – are gone. But the stories. They are alive and well and welcome us back again and again.

Traditions: Where the Stories Live

November 26, 2016March 20, 2024 ~ Sharon Abbott ~ 4 Comments

I am seven. Or ten. Or thirteen. And all of the years in between and the ones that will come after. There she sits in a chair in the middle of the kitchen with the yellow bowl in her lap and a fork in her hand and she is beating the egg whites. She whips them until they are stiff and stand up in peaks. I asked her once if I could help and she let me try it, but I quickly tired of the task and gave it back to her. Did we not have an electric mixer? Or even a hand cranked egg beater? I think maybe we did.But this task she chooses to do by hand. Because that is the way she has always done it and for reasons only God (and she) know, it is the way it should be done. When they are stiff enough to suit her she will mix them with the cooked sugar and syrup mixture and beat it some more and after a long and arduous process, the end result will be a Christmas candy that was a tradition in my family. Divinity. Too sweet for my taste, I didn’t like it then and I don’t like it now. But I loved sitting in that warm kitchen on a winter night, hypnotized by the rhythmic beating of the eggs and my mother’s voice telling me stories of my family and my history.

I learned about the year that she and my sisters spent a whole day making this time-consuming, labor-intensive treat only to have my brothers come in from their farm chores and devour the whole day’s worth of work. Now they would be required to spend another entire Saturday with a fork and bowl of eggs. And so, as they sat there on their kitchen chairs, taking out their frustration on the egg whites in front of them, my sisters hatched a plan. They would hide the fruit of their labor someplace where the boys couldn’t find it and bring it out only on Christmas Day. They knew the perfect hiding place – the elephant cookie jar that sat atop the pie cupboard. As the story goes, the boys looked high and low for that divinity but apparently never thought to look for candy in a cookie jar. Which I always thought didn’t speak too highly of my brothers’ intelligence or scouting abilities . . . but what do I know? At any rate my sisters were delighted with themselves and so every year after they made the divinity under my mother’s careful supervision, sneaked it into the cookie jar, and there it lived until they produced the treat for the family on Christmas Day. When my mother died and we were dividing up her things, my sister Minnie said the only thing she really wanted was that cookie jar – to remind her.

I learned about the war years when sugar was rationed and so there was no candy-making and really no Christmas once word came of my brother: missing in action. Her voice grows quieter and she seems further away and finally there is only the sound of the whirring fork against the sides of the glass bowl, turning the egg whites into divinity.

Some traditions I took with me from my childhood and incorporated them into our own family’s celebrations. Divinity was not one of them.

Some of our holiday traditions came from Paul’s family: chili and cinnamon rolls on Christmas Eve. Long after the rest of his family had moved on to other menus, we held fast. And now most, if not all, of our children celebrate Christmas Eve with chili and cinnamon rolls.

I inherited my mother’s rolling pin and her secret for cutting cinnamon rolls – use thread instead of a knife.

Some traditions we stumbled upon ourselves. The movie on Christmas Eve afternoon was birthed from a need to keep little people distracted and occupied through the long day before Christmas. Taking four little ones to see Cinderella in a real movie theatre and sitting in the front row and watching the three year old talk back to the characters and interact with the story on the screen is one of my favorite Christmas memories. As the step sister assures the prince that it is indeed her slipper, the heroine’s young advocate in the front row jumps to her feet: “She’s lying!!! She’s lying!!! It’s Cinderbrella’s” and the whole audience cheered.

The Advent Calendar grew out of the need to bring structure to the growing list of all the Advent activities as we counted down the days. Who knew what secret delight one would find on the piece of paper with a 20 written on it or a 12 or a 15? Maybe it will say “today we decorate the tree” and it turns the whole day into an event. Or maybe it is “go Christmas shopping” and you load up in the car and go to the discount store and find some awesome treasure for every member of the family – if you are the youngest you will be directed to the rolls of Lifesavers that come in a box that looks like a book because that’s what the youngest always gives to the siblings. When you find “wrap Christmas presents” on the slip of paper, you head off to your own corner with your bag of treasures, a roll of paper, some scissors and a whole roll of tape all to yourself. Of course not every day was something big – sometimes it was the “filler” – the standby for when Mom & Dad hadn’t had time or foresight to plan an activity or come up with something creative: “get a candy cane off the tree”. Oooohhhhhh nooooooooo. And yet. As one of them explained many years later as an adult – “You do know, right, that NONE of the six of us liked peppermint?” But because it was in the Advent Calendar that made it special enough that you took your candy cane, ate it, pretended it was a good thing, and hoped tomorrow would bring something better. And sometimes it did. Like the little Snoopy notepads with little pencils in a little bag. Jackpot!

It’s a little sad the day you realize that some of the traditions you initiated for your young family when you were doing campus ministry no longer work. In those days, all the busyness and craziness came to a screeching halt the week before Christmas as students finished their last exam and left for home and you were left with that most precious of all commodities: time. But then those days give way to a healthy and thriving community church with three Christmas Eve Services and there is no time for Christmas Eve movies or chili and cinnamon rolls. But you adapt. You replace a movie with a breakfast at Waffle House and leave a $100 tip for your waitress who one year is a single mom and hasn’t been able to buy a Christmas present yet for her daughter and you offer a little prayer of gratitude for the opportunity to be a part of this. One year your waiter is named Jack and you learn that he is working on Christmas Eve because he wants to make as much as he can so that he can really party it up on New Year’s Eve and with a sinking feeling you realize where your tip money is going to go, but it leads to a new tradition of toasting Jack at every family gathering. You move the chili and cinnamon rolls to Christmas Day (and alleviate the need to fix a big Christmas dinner that nobody wants to eat anyway – a win/win) and you pass along your Advent Calendar to a young family who is glad for the excitement and anticipation it brings to their home. And life goes on. New traditions are born as old ones die off. . . but the stories. The stories live forever – if they are told – and they bind us both to those who came before and those who will come after

Because here’s the thing. I don’t make divinity. I make (or more accurately made) cinnamon hard candy – the hotter the better. This, too, came from my childhood. And now my daughter makes it and when she brings it we all eat it and say to each other – “it tastes like Christmas”. She makes “Skyline Chili” for her family on Christmas Eve because that is her husband’s tradition. . . and so it goes.

exps13214_ck133085b06_18_1b — I remember that we bought the cinnamon oil at Potter’s Drug Store. They kept it behind the counter and you had to ask the pharmacist to get it for you which gave the whole process some level of intrigue – like we were using some sort of contraband ingredient.

But the stories live on and are passed on and they matter. The traditions can change and adapt and evolve. It’s the stories that ground us and remind us who we are, where we come from, and why we’re here. That’s why I keep the elephant cookie jar (which eventually found its way to my kitchen) on top of my cabinet. I don’t hide divinity in it. . . actually I don’t use it all. But as the keeper of its story, I feel a responsibility to care for it and the memories that live there.

It’s All About the Snacks.

February 3, 2013March 5, 2024 ~ Sharon Abbott ~ 1 Comment

In our family, Super Bowl Sunday was never about the football… unless the Bears or later the Skins were playing… and really, how often does that happen in one’s lifetime??

No. Super Bowl Sunday was always about the food. The snacks. All the stuff you got to eat on that day on any other day would have been considered indulgent and gluttonous. On this day, everything was allowable.

I think it must have been about 1987. I can’t remember if we had friends coming or it was just family – either way it would be a party and I had been cooking (junk) food for days. That afternoon I was finishing up the Chex Party Mix (this was before you bought it in a bag and actually made it from scratch). Joy was “helping” me. We mixed the three different kinds of Chex cereals, the peanuts and then poured the buttery mixture over it and put it in the oven. The M&M’s would be added later. So messy, so fun!! She was at the “helping” stage most children go through at about three or four and she was relishing the role. I remember Fletcher one Thanksgiving when he was about the same age wanting to help. He pulled a chair over to the kitchen sink where I was preparing the turkey to put in the oven. He watched for a while before he put voice to the question, “What is that?” “THIS,” I proclaimed proudly of the 20 pound foul sprawled in my sink, “is the turkey!!” “It looks like some kind of dead animal,” he said with mild alarm in his three year old voice. Well, when you put it that way. . . but I digress.

Joy was helping me with the Chex Mix for the Super Bowl party and carrying on a running dialogue – mostly with herself.“I just love the Super Bowl. I have always loved the Super Bowl. I think Super Bowl parties are the best parties ever. Don’t you love the Super Bowl? When can we have the snacks? What time will the Super Bowl start? How much longer is that? Is this YOUR favorite party? Don’t you just love Chex Mix? Can I have some Chex Mix now? Well, how much longer till the Super Bowl starts? Shall I ask the kids if they are ready for the Super Bowl? Can I fix my bowl of Chex Mix now and just hold it till it’s time for the Super Bowl to start? What shall I wear to the Super Bowl? What are you going to wear to the Super Bowl? How much longer, now?” And so it went…. for most of the afternoon. She was so excited for it all to begin. The other kids begged me to make her stop, but she was not to be shushed “She doesn’t even LIKE to watch football!” they complained. “She hates Sunday afternoons when that’s all we do. Why is this so different?” Who knew?

Finally it was time. She spread out her blanket on the floor. She brought pillows from her bed. She put on her “special party pajamas”. She brought in her favorite doll to enjoy the festivities. She straightened her blanket. She fluffed her pillows. And she oh-so-carefully carried her bowl of Chex Mix into the living room and sat on her blanket. We turned on the television. The announcers were talking, the fans were screaming, aaaand the kick-off. Joy was shocked – almost beyond words. She jumped to her little feet, whipped around with her hands on her hips and in the most accusing and disparaging tone I have ever heard in a three year old she said to me, “THIS LOOKS JUST LIKE FOOTBALL!!”

Whatever she had thought a Super Bowl party meant, never in her wildest dreams did she imagine that it was about football.